Evolution in Product Line Requirements Engineering: A Rationale Management Approach

Product line evolution is one of the burning issues in product line requirements engineering. It is more complicated than single system requirements engineering because of the conflicting requirements across the product lines, the effect of evolution on the reuse and customization, and the global distribution of product line organizations. As product lines are long-term investments, handling their evolution is critical. This paper proposes a new technique called rationale-based product line evolution. It is based on the Questions, Options and Criteria model and a modified version of EasyWinWin. The technique allows the evaluation of change requests in product line requirements based on the informal collaboration of stakeholders, capturing the forces that cause evolution and using them for the justification of change requests. The technique has been implemented in the Sysiphus tool and was validated using empirical evaluation.